


The Sense I Lack

by WhyNotFly



Series: The Aro Archives [5]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Daisy helps Jon with his coping mechanisms, F/F, Hopeful Ending, Internalized Arophobia, M/M, Post-Buried trauma based aro!Daisy Tonner, aro!Jonathan Sims, aromantic solidarity, season four, season four typical Jon moaning about Martin, season four typical depression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-12
Updated: 2021-01-12
Packaged: 2021-03-17 02:42:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28717476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WhyNotFly/pseuds/WhyNotFly
Summary: “That’s it, though.  It’s not love.”  Jon stares down at the lines of his palm as if he could read the answers out of them like statements.  “I don’t think I love Martin.”“Well now I know you need some air.”  Daisy pokes the center of Jon’s glasses so that they push painfully into the bridge of his nose, and he closes his eyes against the intrusion.  “You talk more about Martin than a teenage girl at a sleepover.”
Relationships: Basira Hussein/Alice "Daisy" Tonner (referenced), Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist & Alice "Daisy" Tonner, Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist/Martin Blackwood (referenced)
Series: The Aro Archives [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1714381
Comments: 11
Kudos: 69
Collections: Aspec Archives Week





	The Sense I Lack

“If you wanted me to leave without you, you should have just said.”

Jon picks his head up off the desk, blinking the sleep out of his eyes as Daisy’s outline comes into blurry focus. She’s standing with a hand perched on the jut of her hip, the line of her slanted like a tree in the wind. For a moment, Jon is caught between vision and dream and he sees another version of her painted in the air around her. Something dangerous and bloody. Then he blinks again and it is gone.

“No,” he says, shaking his head and groping along his desk until his fingers close around the thin wireframe of his glasses. When he puts them on they’re smudged and wet with drool. “Stay.”

“Aren’t you a pretty sight?” Daisy steps in closer and leans over Jon’s desk until she can reach into the wild tangle of his hair and muss down the atrocious bedhead he can just barely see floating in the corner of his vision. “Lucky Martin doesn’t come down here or he’d catch one whiff of that morning breath and hightail it.”

“Right. Lucky.” Jon shakes her hand off miserably and scrubs his hands hard over his face, trying to force some feeling back into his skin. “That’s what I am.”

“Oh don’t go losing your sense of humor on me now, Sims. It’s the only reason I hang out with you.” Daisy’s arms tremble for a moment as she struggles to hoist herself up onto his desk, but she doesn’t mention it, so neither does he. They both know what they’ve been through, it’s pointless to wallow in it. Daisy folds her legs criss-cross on top of some very important documents. A year ago, Jon would have frozen in panic. Two years ago, Jon would have thrown a fit. Now he leans over until his chin hits her thigh and rests there.

Daisy glances down at him and raises an eyebrow, unimpressed. “Bad dreams?”

“Ha ha. You’re hilarious.”

“Well something’s wrong.” Daisy twines her fingers into the short hairs at the back of his neck and scratches gently at his hairline. “You’re even gloomier than usual.”

“I was just thinking about Martin,” Jon mumbles, turning his face down so that half the words get lost in the fabric of her trousers. Even still, she knows exactly what he said.

“Ah, of course.”

“No, it’s different this time.” Jon rests the flats of his palms against his desk and pushes himself out from under Daisy’s hand. “I was really thinking about it, and about me, and about him, and about everything.”

“You think too much, Sims. That’s your problem. You put all that effort into dragging yourself out of the coffin only to sit around in a dank basement with no windows, suffocating anyway.” Daisy braces her hands behind her and arches her back, stretching elegantly like a cat. “Come out to the pub. Some air will knock the sense back into you.”

“It isn’t sense I lack,” Jon mutters. “It’s—”

“Martin, yes, I know it’s Martin. Anyone who hangs around this place for thirty _bloody_ seconds picks up on how miserable you are cause you’re monster Romeo down in the garden and he’s your spooky Juliet up on his third floor, corner office balcony.” Daisy claps a hand down on Jon’s shoulder hard enough to sting. “So either move on, or come to the pub with me where it’s appropriate to moan about love and I’m allowed to be too drunk to listen to it.”

“That’s it, though. It’s not love.” Jon stares down at the lines of his palm as if he could read the answers out of them like statements. “I don’t think I love Martin.”

“Well now I _know_ you need some air.” Daisy pokes the center of Jon’s glasses so that they push painfully into the bridge of his nose, and he closes his eyes against the intrusion. “You talk more about Martin than a teenage girl at a sleepover.”

“Exactly. That’s not love it’s...it’s _obsession._ Fixation. It’s not about him, it’s about… about the _concept_ of him.” Jon opens and closes his hands anxiously. He isn’t explaining it well. These aren’t the words. It had been so clear before and now all the words are clogged in his throat like cigarette smoke, and he wishes he could just look himself in the mirror and ask himself a question and let it all unspool like magnetic tape from a shattered cassette. “All this time I had him. All these years and he was _right there_ and I didn’t spare a second thought for him romantically. And then suddenly he becomes this...this unobtainable mystery and now I can’t _stop_ thinkingabout him.”

“So what?” Daisy cocks her head. In her narrowed eyes, Jon sees the shard of ice that always used to chill him to the bone. “You’re worried that it’s the Eye’s dumb girly crush and not yours?”

“When I first met Georgie, back in university, she was the coolest person I’d ever seen. She...she had this leather biker jacket and fingerless gloves, and at least half a dozen men huddled up around her outside this shitty little tavern, trying to offer her a light. I thought, I thought how incredible it would feel to have a little piece of that. To have someone _that_ desirable notice me.” 

Jon looks up at Daisy and she stares back, silently, waiting for the inevitable collapse she must see in his eyes. And Jon almost doesn’t want to say it, even here in his empty office with the only person left in the world who might claim to be his friend. Even when he has nothing left to lose, he still feels shame like paper cuts in his throat. He has been swallowing too many secrets. It stings.

“And then when she did, against all odds, notice me,” Jon whispers, wrapping his arms tight around himself. “It was overwhelming. It was suffocating. I’d been fantasizing about it for months and then as soon as I had it, all I wanted to do was _escape_.”

“Everyone needs their space,” Daisy says with a shrug, as if his could ever be a simple penance. 

“I don’t think I wanted a person. I just wanted the concept of a person.” Jon curls his shoulders down into himself as if he could be forgiven by existing less. “Something impossible that I could never have.”

Daisy drops her shoulders with a heavy sigh and reaches out to grab roughly at Jon’s chin, yanking his head up until he looks at her. Deep beneath the surface, there’s still the familiar thrill of fear at the way her bitten-ragged nails dig into his skin.

“Listen up, Sims,” she rumbles, deep in her throat. “Cause I’m not here for your mopey, feely bullshit, and I’m only going to say this once. You coming down into that coffin and digging me up, that was the true impossible. Once in a lifetime rise from the grave kind of impossible. And I know that what you brought back is not everything I was before.” Daisy pulls her knees up to her chest, tracking the dirt on the soles of her shoes over the papers she’s sitting on. “And when Basira looks at me, I know I’m not the impossibility she wanted.”

Jon opens his mouth to respond and Daisy jabs him firmly in the nose with a finger. “If you try to comfort me I’ll break your jaw, I swear to god. That’s not the point of this.”

“Daisy…” Jon murmurs softly, but he says nothing more, and he doesn’t mention the way she blinks a bit too fast as she tosses her head to the side.

“I dunno if we’ll ever make it back to where we were, with her trusting me and me trusting myself. Maybe she’ll find someone else, or maybe I will, or maybe we’ll choose to stay together even if we know it’s just a choice and not an _inevitability_.” Daisy plonks her chin down to rest in the dip between her knees. “Maybe I’ll never remember _how_ I used to love her. But just cause it’s gone doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have tried.”

Jon reaches out and wraps a hand around Daisy’s ankle, fingers too weak to properly squeeze. “It feels like if I stop thinking about Martin, I’d fail him. I’d be letting him slip away. Like I just _need_ so badly to be in love with him so that it all _means_ something.”

“Everything you do, you do because you think other people want you to.” Daisy covers his hand with her own and her fingers are heavy on his skin. “But this one isn’t actually about Martin, you know. It’s about you.”

Jon squeezes his eyes shut against the hot tears blurring his vision and shakes his head violently. “Of _course_ it’s about Martin, it _has_ to be about Martin, he’s the one who—”

“The world is shit, Sims.” Daisy pries Jon’s fingers off her ankle one by one until she can pull her legs free and jump down off his desk. “Your world is especially shit, trust me, I’ve contributed to it. If the imaginary future with Martin where you’re in love forever is what makes you get up in the morning, put your trousers on, and try to do something better with yourself, then that’s enough.”

Daisy knocks the back of her knuckles hard against the surface of her desk. “We have precious few lifelines already, don’t need to go throwing them out the window on the chance they might not be our happily ever after.”

“I’m the only one he has left in the world, and all I’m doing is using him.” Jon feels the bitter laughter rising like stomach acid. “I truly am a monster.”

“I genuinely don’t care _what_ you are.” Daisy crouches by the side of Jon’s chair and presses the palm of one warm hand flat against his trembling chest. “As long as you’re the version that keeps getting up every morning.”

“Not everyone would agree with that.” Jon’s vision wobbles as the tears finally begin to pile up and overflow.

“Fuck them. What Martin doesn’t know can’t hurt him. If you need to be in love with him, then be in love with him.”

Daisy easily supports Jon’s weight as he slips out of the seat of his chair to his knees in front of her. Her movements are easy, practiced, and her face is cool and empty. Jon digs through her gaze trying to find pity, but he comes up empty handed. 

“I’m scared,” Jon whispers as he finally lets himself tilt forward into the comforting darkness of her shoulder.

“That’s the way of the world.”

Jon burrows his face in deeper, as if he could escape his own words. “I’m scared that I’ll succeed, and I’ll have the happy ending I fantasized about, and I won’t _want_ it. And then what will I have left?”

“You’ll find something else to wake up for. A new fantasy.” Daisy’s hand comes around behind Jon and scratches up and down his back. “Living is changing. You’ll just have to keep figuring out what you want over and over and over again.”

“But what if I never actually want to be with _anyone?_ ”

“Then don’t.” Daisy shrugs gently and Jon’s head rocks with the motion. “You don’t need to be with anyone. Nobody does.”

“But isn’t that unfair?” Jon can barely get the words out through the sob that breaks in his throat. “To make Martin think we get to be together and then just take it all away because I can’t love him?”

Daisy whistles low, a hint of humor chasing its way through her drawling tone. “Well now, doesn’t someone have a high opinion of himself? You’re not the only person in the world that can make Martin happy. He’d find something else too. He’s stronger than you think.”

Jon’s laugh turns snotty in his nose as he lifts a hand to wipe at the absolute mess he’s made of his face. He barely remembers back to when he used to be professional. Back when he’d wanted so badly to keep this job. Now he’s stuck in this dingy old basement surrounded by his papers and his files and he can’t even have faith that he could ever be happier than this. Maybe if he had Martin around, he’d remember to believe in his own future. Maybe that’s all Martin’s ever been to him. A promise that there’s still something good left in the world.

Maybe that’s all that he needs to be.

“I’m tired,” Jon says, drawing in a deep breath that smells like Daisy and deodorant and the faint undertone of sweat. 

“Well how about this. In exchange for waking you up from your nap, you can have my shoulder.” Daisy shuffles closer to him, hiking his head up until he’s resting properly against her. “And if Martin happens to come down here, I promise I’ll wake you.”

“What about the pub?” Jon asks, already struggling to keep his eyes open against the gentle rhythmic pulse of Daisy’s heartbeat against his chest. “Won’t Basira miss you?”

“Don’t worry about that,” Daisy murmurs. “I’m yours as long as you want me.” 

**Author's Note:**

> Happy aspec archives week! I love you all, and I'm glad to be back on my bullshit of making angsty aromantic season four jonmartin fics. This time featuring some soft Daisy friendship. Oh! And thanks to Lith for the beta :)
> 
> If you liked this, you can come chat with me on tumblr [@apatheticbutterflies](https://apatheticbutterflies.tumblr.com/) I'm very cool and fun and post lots of writing. Also!! Check out the event I'm helping run, [Tma Mspec Week!!!](https://tma-mspec-week.tumblr.com/) It's just a week for writing about any kind of canon or headcanons of magnus archives characters and multi attracted orientations like bi, pan, omni, etc. It's gonna be a really fun time!!!


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